Comfort Music

We all know about comfort food, those special dishes that we reserve for those times when we require soothing, calming, or reassuring. They vary with the individual but typically they are uncomplicated and homely fare, stuff that may lack aristocracy but exudes warmth and reliability. Among my stalwarts: spaghetti with meat sauce, pot roast, and that old-timey Southern favorite, chicken with gravy.

Comfort is not limited to food. I have a short list of musical compositions that I turn to when my spirit is troubled, storm clouds loom on my emotional horizon, or I'm just plain frazzled. Or my mood may be just fine and dandy, but I want to touch base with a dearly loved musical friend. I present my top three Comfort Music favorites, with recommendations for recordings.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending for violin and orchestra

George Meredith's sweet poem evokes a dreamy sunlit world of pastoral contentment. His eponymous skylark rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound…For singing till his heaven fills, ‘Tis love of earth that he instils. Inspired by Meredith's radiant vision, Vaughan Williams conjured up an ethereal dreamscape by carefully limiting his harmonic palette, allowing the solo violin little more than a pentatonic scale (D-E-G-A-B) harmonized by the orchestra in E Minor/Aeolian, balanced by a quasi-modal but recognizable C Major underpinning for the folksong-like central interlude. Drifting parallel chords in the orchestra provide a breathless background to delicate violin passages that not so much mimic the song of a skylark as they invoke the joyous serenity and purity of the natural world. Achingly nostalgic for a dreamworld English countryside but free of the slightest hint of cheap sentimentality, The Lark Ascending is fifteen minutes of flawlessly sustained loveliness.

Only a bovine clod could fail to respond to the Lark's otherworldly allure, and fortunately for us, bovine clods don't usually make commercial recordings. We are blessed with an exultation of Larks. A few stand out from the distinguished company. Pride of place must go to the matchless English violinist Hugh Bean as he joined Sir Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic in 1967 for an ecstatic rendition that hints of passions lurking just beneath the music's gently shimmering surface. Another remarkable English violinist, Iona Brown, made a specialty of the piece; with Neville Marriner leading her home orchestra, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, she gifted posterity with a priceless 1972 performance. In 2004 the young American violinist Hilary Hahn joined Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra for a particularly dreamy and poised traversal, distinguished by Hahn's spun-gold tone and an LSO playing from the core of its collective heart. Another notable recent performance comes from Manchester's superb Hallé Orchestra and its leader (concertmaster) Lyn Fletcher, in a delicately fragrant performance conducted by Sir Mark Elder.

Frederick Delius: On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, for orchestra

A fragile sliver of orchestral crystal, Cuckoo manages to celebrate that time-honored meme of a descending minor-third cuckoo-bird call without lapsing into silliness. That's easier said than done; cuckoo-bird calls have been comic staples for generations, after all. But Delius pulled it off with a combination of dreamily-paced compound duple meter, richly evocative chromatic harmony, and by exquisitely-timed placements of his birdcalls so as to suggest rather than document. I'll grant that Delius is an acquired taste for most listeners, but even the most ardent anti-Delius crank can make an exception for this tiny masterpiece, a sweet flower of English impressionism in its finest, albeit brief, flowering.

Like The Lark Ascending, Delius' little Cuckoo is shielded from insensitive performances by its status as a fragrant English miniature and is therefore given invariably loving treatment by its (always English) performers. Sir Thomas Beecham, probably the greatest Delius interpreter of them all, gave us a slowly meditative and Romantic performance with his own Royal Philharmonic in 1956, still after all these years the reference recording. Subsequent performances vary in tempo but always seem to capture the work's fleeting charm. Sir Charles Mackerras brought his sterling musicianship to the Welsh National Orchestra in 1990 and gave us a leisurely and captivating rendition à la Beecham that never drags or falters. Compared to those two examples, Vernon Handley's rather more direct 1977 approach with the London Philharmonic might seem downright rushed, but it isn't really. Over a minute shorter than either Beecham or Mackerras, Handley's loving direction encompasses the listener in a golden bath of sound. Sir Mark Elder is more in Handley's camp than Beecham's, but the delicate tone-spinning of the Hallé Orchestra wafts the music along with all appropriate grace and gentleness. All in all, it's really hard to screw up On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. That isn't to say that I can't imagine some idiot brutalizing the poor thing. It could be done. But I don't ever want to hear it.

Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 27: III – Adagio

Sergei Rachmaninoff is having a loud, long posthumous last laugh, and I say bully for him. All those critics who dissed him as a musical dinosaur, bearer of a guttering torch for a played-out idiom, a musty Tchaikovskian lost in a world crackling with Stravinskian neoclassicism and Schoenbergian atonality. Nuts to them all. Rachmaninoff's music has shown a staying power far beyond the unlovable modernist scratchings so acclaimed by those cocksure pundits. No Rachmaninoff work better exemplifies his improved stature than the Second Symphony, without a doubt the finest of his three symphonies and one of the glories of Russian orchestral music. The third-movement Adagio sustains its gravely beautiful melodies in one of the great clarinet passages in the literature, hiding its skillful contrapuntal texture within cushions of ravishing harmony. Nowadays it's considered bad taste to present the movement in an abbreviated, mutilated form; we're better listeners now, our attention spans improved, our respect greater. Nothing is more melodically satisfying than the Rachmaninoff 2nd's slow movement, but it's a tricky piece to pull off successfully. A good performance requires an expert balance between passion and poise.

My personal favorite is Mariss Jansons conducting the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, recorded in exceptionally fine sound by EMI in 1999. All that big-boned Russian playing, but tempered by the hand of a master conductor with a keen ear for details of orchestral texture. Another particularly compelling performance comes to us from the dynamite combo of Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, captured in ravishing audio by Channel Classics. Fischer and his honed band pour on the passion, to be sure, but within a context of luscious orchestral tone. The thing's a wonder, pure and simple. And to round out the selection, there's an iconic performance from André Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra from 1973, truly a high point in the history of both this magical symphony and the LSO itself.

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